This time on the Silver Screen Shootout (that’s even better alliteration than Friday Night Gunfights), we turn to the smaller screen, and look at a gunfight in HBO’s hit crime series True Detectives (Season Two)

OVERVIEW: The shootout in question occurs in Season 2, Episode 4, Down Will Come. A multi-agency law enforcement “task force” (really just an ad hoc raid team) is executing a warrant on a known drug manufacturing location.

Here’s a look. The fight actually begins at about 01:03, and rolls pretty much through the end; the shooting actually stops around 07:35. The pace, length, physical and mental impact, and confusion of this scene are all significant (Rachel McAdams, “Ani Bezzerides”, actually puked during the filming of the scene from the physical stress). That may actually be the most realistic thing about it.

THE GOOD: Excellent display of movement techniques once things get going. Communication between officers is calm and concise, everyone is making consistent use of cover and concealment and there is great continuity of fire – that is, somebody always has a gun on the target while someone else is moving. There are also multiple depictions of well-executed emergency reloads. Some other good points:

• At least three of them lived.

• It’s make believe, and on TV.

• Good use of suppressive fire, which does have its place in an LE environment (though in LEO parlance it’s called “directed fire”).

THE BAD: Everyone clinging to vehicles as they move and return fire. Vehicles, at best, are “enhanced concealment” and should be used to keep the lead off only in extremis. They will not reliably stop bullets in the same fashion as some of those brick walls would have, and should not be depended on as a primary cover strategy. The raid opens with a gaggle of officers walking very dramatically down the middle of the street. This looks cool, but announces your presence and makes you more susceptible to multiple casualties – which was illustrated in the scene.

Some more bad points:

• Terrible violation of the dress code. Gangbangers pulling security for an industrial sized cook operation calls for something more than ten LEOs in soft armor, pistols, and a shotgun.

• Failure to listen to sage advice. Why not wait on them to exit and use the open air option, or take them down away from their stronghold? There’s very likely a good reason the fat old cop got to be fat and old.

• No attempt to split and “L” out on the hostage taker.

THE UGLY: Well, lots of it, not least the fact that this is not that unrealistic scenario in some places. Patrol officers are far better trained and equipped nowadays than they have ever been previously, but LEOs are still capable of extraordinary blunders in a fight — many of which should be tactically retardataire but are not.

Why bring a pistol when a long gun will do? Why bring a shottie if you can bring a rifle? The use of optics-equipped carbines in this situation would likely have decreased the number of casualties and shortened the amount of time officers spent trading fire with the bad guys. High angle, medium range (20+ yards) shots with a pistol are low-percentage engagements for most of us. A short-barreled carbine with a red dot or low-power glass would have made much shorter work of anybody shooting from a window. An officer with a carbine could have better suppressed, if not eliminated, such threats. This has been recently illustrated—both positively and negatively—in actual OIS footage from Buckeye, AZ and Dundalk, MD respectively. (We’ve recently addressed both shootings in previous reviews. Just because this particular shooting is fictitious doesn’t mean it has nothing to teach us.)

Departments not issuing patrol carbines, particularly for the type of high-risk warrant service depicted in this clip, are setting their officers up for potentially tragic failure. Also, any suspected cook house should be treated as a potential explosive and hazmat situation, and all tactical plans should factor these risks into consideration.

Some other ugly points:

• No attempt to render aid to downed civilians and other officers.

• No perimeter in place to keep bad guys from going mobile and contain squirters.

• Negligent brass. Any supervisors responsible for, “Bosses said go in and take them,” would be as negligent as the officers making the hit.

For the Purists — ZEROING IT IN

We’ll update this as readers comment and we’re able.

• Did they use a threat matrix to evaluate the need for the involvement of a specialized unit? The NTOA and common sense both recommend it. How many are in there? What are they armed with? What is the proximity of civilians?

• Did it occur to no one to grab a couple of extra magazines before a raid?

• Was this hit so important there wasn’t any time to do some intel gathering and rehearsals?

• No fire, EMS, HAZMAT…?

• Note: hat tip to Detective Ray Velcoro (played by Colin Farrell) for his choice of the Browning Hi-Power; perhaps not the best choice with which to throw down against AKMSUs and Steyr SPPs, but class. Smug, borderline supercilious glance at Trooper Paul Woodrugh for his use of the S&W 4006 (though that’s CHP’s fault).

What did we miss? Let us know in the comments section. TTPs, equipment, whatever. We’re geardos and gunnerds to the Nth degree. We could talk about this all day.

[Join us Friday evening every Friday of the first full week of the month – there’s gotta be a better way to say that – for another installment of Friday Night Gunfights. We beat at least a dozen of them outta Marshall before he left us. Mad Duo]

Contingency: Exercise your inner perv with us on Tumblr here, follow us on Twitter here or connect on Google + here.Emergency: Activate firefly, deploy green (or brown) star cluster, get your wank sock out of your ruck and stand by ’til we come get you.

T&C: All original material published by Breach-Bang-Clear is the copywritten property of Breach-Bang-Clear, Inc. If you wish to repost, republish, or otherwise share our content, feel free to reproduce an extract of up to 225 words and one complete, unaltered image, preceded by attribution crediting the source and author’s name, to include a link to the Breach-Bang-Clear home page, with a link back to the full article on our website, BreachBangClear.com. You do not require our permission to do this. Please do not reproduce our content in its entirety without contacting us first. We do allow full syndication on a case by case basis (credited, and posted with a canonical link, as is common practice and in good form) but only when mutually agreed upon beforehand. If you wish to reproduce a complete article, please contact us for permission to publish first.

About the Author: Tom Marshall is an interesting miscegenation of background experiences. He’s a former active duty US Army officer, but before that was a graduate of the US Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, NY. Before accepting his commission as a 2LT, Midshipman Marshall spent a year travelling the world on a variety of merchant shipping vessels, including several months attached to Military Sealift Command. After returning from sea, he spent a summer working at the HQ training facility for Blackwater USA.

Tom spent four years in the Cavalry with a Stryker Brigade, including a one-year tour to Iraq with 4th BCT, 2nd Infantry (“Raiders”). Among other assignments he worked S-3 before taking over a Recce Platoon. He earned the rank of Captain and spent his final year in a HQ Company XO billet. After departing the military he spent about a year and a half working security at a federally-contracted Corrections facility before going back overseas in a PMC job working security and force protection for government personnel working in high threat environments around the world. Tom has written for Guns & Ammo, World of Firepower, SWAT Magazine, Black Sheep Warrior, RECOIL Magazine, and Emerge Social, a PR firm specializing in digital brand management for firearms-industry clients. Despite being an officer we actually trust him (mostly) with a compass. Tom Marshall may or may not have been the inspiration for the best selling issue of Urecco. You can follow him on Facebook at /TMAuthor/ or on Instagram, @tom.marshall.author.

Related Articles

3 Comments

This was one of the good scenes in an otherwise rather unwatchable series… 🙂

A few things:

Not rendering first aid: After initial contact, this turned into a counter-ambush situation, which quickly turned into a fleeing felon situation, which quickly turned into essentially an active shooter situation. I believe ‘in the fight’ LE are specifically trained to NOT worry about first aid in those situations, because an officer giving first aid is not an officer who is actively working to stop the threat. Situation dictates, but it seemed like most of the LE injuries in the video clip were either instantly fatal or of such severity that field first aid wouldn’t have been much good.

Not setting a perimeter: At the 00:52 mark, Ani DOES direct other officers to “Cut through and cover the back…” I assume the point was to set up a perimeter to address anybody fleeing the scene. Things went to hell immediately after the order was given, however.

Guns don’t instantly kill you?!?: At 4:49 Ray tags a bad guy in the arm/shoulder, and instead of flying 8 feet through the air and dying in gruesome Hollywood fashion he….wait for it…keeps fighting even though he’s injured. Rather unusually realistic.

The good guys are responsible for every bullet they fire: At 5:08 a plainclothes officer attempts to engage a bad guy and accidentally shoots (and probably kills) a civilian trying to flee the area. Whatever the real world ramifications would end up being, they wouldn’t be pleasant or easy for this officer.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if I recall the overall plot of the season correctly the assignment was a ‘throwaway’ by the corrupt brass who was… I dunno the phrase… showing hostile negligence. The main murder case of the show points to higher ups and their weird ass economic zone shenanigans. So they (conjecture here) pick a point on the map they only have fuzzy intel on and, while not an ambush and/or suicide mission per-se the drug lab had nothing to do with the birdhead murders. There’s no further intel on purpose:

Scenario A) Cops get some bad dudes, who get pinned with the murders.

Scenario B) Lead detectives get killed, city mourns, business as usual.

What they didn’t count on was Scenario C) Clusterfuck yet 3/4 of our leads survive.

While “Ani” running after the Tahoe and shooting at it made for good Hollywood visual, really not effective fire. She would have been better off taking a good stance from a position of cover and trying to shoot as accurately as possible, possibly hitting the driver.

Did not see anyone on the radio advising incoming backup where they were. Also, nobody calling out shots fired officers down, start EMS, and asking for the Airship.

Someone could have grabbed the 870 from the downed officer who dropped at the start of the shooting.

Agreed, patrol carbines would be the order of the day. A pistol is just there (preferably) so you can fight your way to a long gun.

Also agreed, there are better ways to deal with a stash house. A place like that, let your U/C detectives keep it under surveillance and let the SWAT team hit it when they want to on their terms.

Still, very intense sequence and well put together. Nice to see a Hi-Power in action, they don’t get much love these days with the amount of “Tupperware” guns that are preferred fodder of Hollyweird.